Full Throttle (Slight Return)

I wrote this piece for The Guardian on Full Throttle recently. It went down okay for a slight return. I did get this comment though:

This is because the strapline took my badly-worded sentence ‘Full Throttle examines how gallant, restrained masculinity could function as an action-adventure ideal using every [game] material available’ and slightly misinterpreted it. But I could have worded it like, ‘Full Throttle uses every game material available to examine a restrained, gallant action-adventure masculinity’, or something to that effect. I wanted to say: the fact that every part of the game is involved in demonstrating gallant and restrained masculinity, a masculinity of service and thrift, and not wild, laser-blasting excess, is kind of interesting in the game sphere. Sadly that was groundbreaking and in some ways still is, mainly because many of today’s masculine-heroed game narratives are purely about consumption and destruction and not people and restoration. Anyway, I fucked that sentence up. Sorry. I could have been clearer.

Interestingly, another car-related narrative that resurfaced recently, Max Max: Fury Road, also tries to make the main male character secondary, or the homme fatale, to the female protagonist, just like Full Throttle’s Ben and Mo relationship. (From my now deleted Twitter account, preserved by the miracle of lovely followers I was blessed with:)

So you see, Full Throttle predicted Fury Road by a number of years, and therefore everyone who worked on it is a genius.